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Developers have two new ways to publish code to the Heroku Platform-as-a-Service. Heroku recently added mechanisms to push code stored in either Github or Dropbox. These features, currently in beta, give Heroku a set of deployment techniques that compare favorably to other PaaS providers.

Heroku is trying to make it easier to turn source code into a running application. The Heroku Button – a simple bit of HTML or Markdown that triggers a deployment from a public GitHub repository to Heroku’s public cloud – sets up Heroku as an attractive destination for quickly previewing, hosting, and extending open source web applications.

Tesora, previously known as Parelastic is developing a DBaaS for OpenStack. Tesora has partnered with the OpenStack Trove community and its DBaaS solution has had support from day zero for MySQL. Now it has added support for MongoDB offering SQL and NoSQL databases to be deployed side by side..

Heroku – acquired by Salesforce.com in 2010 – has just introduced its first built-in integration service for the two cloud platforms. This bi-directional data synchronization between Heroku Postgres and the Salesforce (Oracle) database is positioned as a way to connect mobile, consumer facing applications hosted in Heroku with business systems running in Salesforce.

PaaS provider Heroku recently announced an expansion of their global footprint and introduced a set of architectural updates. Although missing a Safe Harbor agreement, Heroku is the latest PaaS vendor to establish a European presence. They have also added a new “scale up” options for cloud processes, isolated networking, and a tool for checking the production readiness of an application.

Heroku Dataclips 2.0 are a new way of sharing data - much like GitHub Gists. Exposing results of running SQL statements agains Postgres databases, Dataclips render in HTML, IFrames, CSV, XLS and JSON. Supporting revisions and versioning as well as forking they work as self-updating stand-alone data views or as simple HTTP based data APIs.

Python has joined the growing ranks of officially-supported languages on Heroku's polyglot platform, going into public beta this week. Python was the most-requested language for Heroku, and it brings with the Django web framework.

Play!, a Java Web Framework is now available on Heroku as a public beta. Play! is built on Netty and is well suited for handling asynchronous I/Os. It is based on a "share-nothing" stateless programming model.

Heroku recently announced its new Cedar stack and the addition of Node.js and Clojure as new deployment languages. InfoQ spoke with Heroku Co-Founder Adam Wiggins about this recent development, underlying principles and future plans. He compares a PAAS to an Operating System for the Cloud built atop of the combination of powerful, existing tools.

New customers trying Engine Yard's Ruby cloud platform AppCloud get the first 500 hours for free. These trial accounts come with a default Ruby configuration and run on 2 virtual cores with 1.7GB of memory. After the 500 hours the account can be upgraded to a paying account or simply expire at no cost.

The first four NoSQL datastores are available as Add-ons for the Heroku PaaS (platform-as-a-service) platform. Using the Add-on system that was introduced in October 2009, CouchDB from Cloudant, Membase from NorthScale, MongoDB from MongoHQ and Redis were made available for Heroku users.